USTheater is devoted to plays, operas, and performances, American and international, performed and published in the United States. We also are open to new plays by playwrights.
All materials are copyrighted as noted. The blog is edited and much of it written by Douglas Messerli

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Eugene
O’Neill The Emperor Jones /
performed by The Wooster Group in a video of 1999, stage performances in Hong
Kong and Chicago in 2009, and early work-in-progress performances in New York
from 1992

It
will be hard for many theater-goers, surely, to watch any version today of
Eugene O’Neill’s early success, The
Emperor Jones. Not only is a the central figure, Brutus Jones, presented as
a vain and foolish black who has temporarily hood-winked the citizens of a
Caribbean country, but he speaks in a dialect right out of minstrelsy, that
uses the “n”-word too many times to count. The first few sentences out of Jones’
mouth says it all:

Who dare whistle dat way
in my palace? Who dare

wake up de Emperor? I'll get de
hide frayled off someo' you niggers sho!

The
Wooster Group production from the 1990s and the early years of the new century,
at least saved its audiences from having to spend an hour with this wincingly
painful language coming out of the mouth of black man; in their production, a
woman, Kate Valk, plays Jones. But she does so, dressed in a garish imitation
of a Japanese emperor’s robe like something out of The Mikado, while in blackface.

It’s almost as if Wooster director,
Elizabeth LeCompte, were taunting the liberal and conservative correct-thinking
fates. Surely the NEA critics of Reagan’s day might have had a hissy-fit if
they’d seen this show.

Miraculously, however, the Wooster group
and Kate Valk, in particular, have created a work that not only questions the
very values of O’Neill’s original, but that actually touches both our
intellects and our hearts, partially restoring the intentions of O’Neill’s
original. By layering the various levels of white bigotry that has made Brutus
Jones such a self-destructive being, we discover his real humanity sometimes
hidden by both the original text and the theatrical interpretations of such a
figure. Valk majestically takes on this character with all the crazed
enthusiasm of the characters in Jean Genet’s The Blacks, and in her interchanges with the sometimes garbled
video presentation of (his) white “partner,” Smithers (William Dafoe in the
video version and Scott Shepherd and Ari Fliakos in stage versions) speaking an
equally exaggerated Irish brogue, reveals his knowledge that any royalty
bequeathed him is only temporary.

Jones, in Valk’s performance, may be a
con-man, even a brutal dictator, but unlike so many of real-life strong-men, he
is no liar and is not self-deluded: he admits he has only taken on his role to
get the money. His fate, in short, has predetermined the greed of the white men
and women who behind the ridiculous wardrobe and paint to which sacrificed his
reality.

The decision to have Jones played,
accordingly, by a woman in blackface is brilliant in its Brechtian positing of
that character. But to successfully navigate the obvious pitfalls of the
language you need the brilliance of someone like Valk.

Hooting
(“Hah-Hah-Hah,” in seeming imitation of Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire) and hollering, by turns; seriously
terrified by his fate and comically mocking his whole ridiculous “reign,” the
Emperor of this work runs the gambit of emotional expressions. Valk is at once
a peacock and a wide-eyed child-on-the-run, terrified of being caught and
lynched. His own myth, that he can be killed only with a silver bullet, makes
him a kind of vampire, which, in fact, he has been playing, sucking the blood
from his own kind.

If Valk’s performance, as Charles
Isherwood, has argued in The New York
Times is legendary, she is supported fortunately by excellent company
actors in Dafoe, Shepard and the multi-gifted Fliakos, but by the memorable
costumes and the delicious score of composter David Linton.

LeCompte’s eccentric direction is not to
be ignored. It’s hard to explain it, but a short dance by the Emperor and his
hit-man Smithers, in which they enact a kind of synchronized Kabuki mime,
brought tears to my eyes.

The video which I watched was first
shown, apparently, in 1999. But the same DVD contains performances from 2009 at
Chicago’s Goodman Theater and the Hong Kong Arts Festival, as well as early
work-in-progress performances at The Performing Garage in October 1992. I
preferred the taped performances to Christopher Kondek and Elizabeth LeCompte’s
video. Both the Goodman Theater and Hong Kong performances were wonderful, but
perhaps because of the needs of the audience, Valk more clearly enunciated her
words in the Hong Kong performance, giving the role much more clarity. But
perhaps, having by then seen so many versions, I simply heard it with more
comprehension. Seeing this production so many times, however, is a reward for
anyone truly interested in American theater.

First
presented in a shorter version at the LA Fringe Festival, Janet Schlapkohl’s play
My Sister played January through
March of this year, with its production recently extended, at Los Angeles’
Odyssey Theatre.

Schlapkohl’s play is set in the Berlin
of the 1930s, so one can be assured that it is a story involving Nazi Germany.
However, in this case the central (and only on-stage) characters are not Jewish
nor have they been intentionally undermining Hitler’s Nationalist Socialist
government. Indeed these two provincial twins, Magda and Matilde—wonderfully
performed by two real-life twins, Elizabeth and Emily Hinkler—have come to the
capitol to free themselves from country restrictions, hoping to perform (in
Magda’s case) and to write (in Matilde’s instance). Indeed Magda, the less
intellectually endowed of the two, seems quite comfortable at moments with the
rising anti-Jewish sentiments and the introduction of Hitlerian Eugenics at the
hospital where she works during the days as a cleaning woman.

Despite their lack of food and finances,
however, they might have survived the impending war—in fact, Magda does. The
only problem is that the more perceptive of the two, Matilde, is disabled,
crippled, with her left arm frozen into upright position. Any attempt to move
it takes all her concentration and muscular power. It is Matilde who writes the
comic skits that Magda has just begun to perform at a local lesbian cabaret.

As the days pass, however, Hitler’s
government increasingly creates new rules that begin to close down the cabarets
and make performing any kind of humor more and more difficult. Matilde, who,
unlike her sister, can speak English and who listens all day long as she sits
in their apartment to her beloved radio, begins to realize the increasing
dangers, and tries to instill what she perceives into her sister’s thinking.
Magda, however, does perceive the dangers if she were actually to repeat all
the jibes and jokes that Matilde has written for her to perform, and waters-down
some of her material.

And even Magda gradually begins to
perceive the difficulties of surviving, particularly after she discovers that
the vans presumably taking some of the disabled patients to better facilities
are actually transporting them to their deaths. The sudden disappearance of one
of her favorite child patients devastates her as she is forced to “pay
attention”—a problem she has evidently had all through her childhood education—recognizing
that her beloved sister is now in danger, particularly since the apartment manager,
who knows of her condition, has himself become a Nationalist Socialist
supporter.

She is ready, in fact, to give up any
career aspirations, despite the fact that she may be auditioned through her act
for an a film role in one of Goebel’s movies; but Matilde insists that she
continue in perusing her dreams. Since the government has now banned post-war radios,
Magda insists that she also take away Matilde’s one source with the world
outside, as she heads off to the performance.

Presumably, it is the loss of that
connection with the world that forces the disabled girl to attempt to follow
her sister to the theater.

While Magda begins to present the skit,
to an audience now filled with Nazi soldiers, she shifts entirely away from her
original satire, singing, instead, a German folk song in which the soldiers
join in singing.

At that very moment, so we are told by
Magda in a postlude, Matilde has taken a fall down the stairs without actually
hurting herself; nonetheless she is taken to the hospital and ferried way
either for experimentation or extermination before Magda can even reach the
hospital.

If the ending, given Matilde’s seemingly
rash decision to leave the apartment, seems somewhat contrived, we nonetheless know
that eventually someone would have come to take away the “imperfect” girl.
Moreover, how might she able to survive for so many years in such complete
isolation? In such a fascist world, it is apparent, everyone’s dreams were
dashed and people were destroyed for simply being different from others, a
particularly ironic statement given that the two women are, in reality,
identical twins.